Amazon is known for its semi-proprietary versions of Android and Linux that have appeared on a variety of mobile and consumer electronics devices from the Amazon Fire TV Stick to the Amazon Echo. Yet, for its foray into the generally MCU-based RTOS world, Amazon has gone completely open source.

Open source OSes like Linux and FreeRTOS continue to grow as proprietary platforms decline, according to AspenCore’s 2017 survey of embedded developers. The survey found “Embedded Linux” and FreeRTOS to be in first and second place, at 22 and 20 percent for “current use,” but with their order projected to reverse over the next 12 months to 27 and 28 percent, potentially moving FreeRTOS to the top of the heap.

The growing trend toward cloud-native programming is fundamentally changing the way applications are developed, integrating and automating pieces previously separated and delayed by disjointed manual processes. Adopting strategies to take advantage of more efficient development opportunities has become mission-critical for competitive businesses, but making the transition rapidly can open organizations to risk — or at the very least disorganized operations and cultural inconsistencies.

There's a little more than two years left until Python 2 will be officially discontinued by upstream and Ubuntu is preparing accordingly for this end of life.

With the recent Ubuntu 17.10 release was the first time they were able to ship Ubuntu Linux without Python 2 pre-installed. The next step in Ubuntu phasing out Python 2 support is by demoting it from the "main" archive to the broader "universe" archive. Then a few years out, Python 2 will be dropped completely.

Linux Mint 18.3 has been released at Wednesday, 27 November 2017 with codename "Sylvia". Version 18.3 is an LTS release based on Ubuntu 16.04, and, a continuation towards the versions 18, 18.1, and 18.2. This article mentions the download links, mirrors, and torrents for Mint 18.3 Cinnamon and MATE editions, for both 32bit and 64bit types.

The Fedora Project's currently underway elections for the Fedora Council, FESCo, and the Mindshare committee have been canceled due to some glitches in making the interview material available. The project plans to get its act together and retry the elections in early January.

It also ships with the Linux 4.13.4 kernel compiled by the developer with extra hardware support, but the biggest change, however, is the replacement of the Refracta Installer with the recently released Calamares 3.1.9 universal installer framework for GNU/Linux distributions, which lets users choose their preferred language when the installation starts.

They're continuing to develop games as an indie studio, so they will be self-publishing. I'm happy they're able to continue to remain indie, because Firewatch really was quite an amazing experience. If you haven't tried it and you love a good story, do check it out! Anyway, back to In the Valley of Gods…

It's another first-person adventure game, this time it's set in Egypt in the 1920s. You play as an explorer and filmmaker as you and your partner are attempting to make a seemingly-impossible discovery and an incredible film. That's a very interesting synopsis, so hopefully it's just as interesting as it sounds.

This is the first release candidate for the upcoming Wine 3.0. It marks the beginning of the code freeze period. There have been many last minute changes, so please give this release a good testing to help us make 3.0 as good as possible.

The highly anticipated Wine 3.0 open-source compatibility layer for installing and running Windows apps and games on Linux and UNIX-like operating systems just got its first Release Candidate today.

The Wine developers met at the end of October in Poland for the WineConf2017 annual Wine Conference to talk about the next major release, Wine 3.0, and it's awesome new features like Direct3D 11 and Android support, and promised to release Wine 3.0 to the world by the end of the year.

Just as planned, the first release candidate for Wine 3.0 and it also marks the project's code/feature freeze.

A big change with Wine 3.0-RC1 is that Direct3D 11.0 is now enabled by default on AMD and Intel graphics processors! The D3D11 support in Wine still isn't completely baked, but it's working for several Direct3D 11 games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Prey 2017, Crysis 2 and Witcher 3 to now enjoy under Linux.

Keith Packard has sent out his latest X.Org Server side patches for the improvements he's been working on the past year for improving the SteamVR / VR HMD support on the Linux desktop.

Keith sent out the latest patches for adding RandR 1.6 leases support. These have been re-based against the latest X.Org Server Git code and while there was initial DRM leasing in Linux 4.15, Keith says these patches only work against drm-next, which would mean Linux 4.16. These patches do go through and wire up the leasing support with the xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver.

In November, the CEO of Uber revealed that the company had paid a hacker $100,000 to delete data obtained from a 2016 breach in which 57 million Uber customers' and drivers' names, email addresses, and phone numbers were exposed. But the company did not reveal who the hacker was or how the payment was made.

A Reuters report now casts a bit more light on how the company concealed its blackmail payment—the money was paid out to an as-yet-unidentified Florida man through Uber's bug bounty program, now managed by HackerOne. How Uber officials confirmed the deletion of the data has not been revealed, and a number of US senators have asked for an investigation into the breach, citing questions about why Uber failed to contact law enforcement.

We already have given a workaround to Install Softwares offline in Ubuntu. As far as I tested, it was one of the easiest way for installing packages on offline Ubuntu systems. However, there is a limitation in that method. You can only download and install the software for the same Ubuntu version. In other words, If you download a package in Ubuntu 14.04, and try to install it on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, It will not work. So, the online and offline should be the same version and architecture. Also, that method is meant for the systems that have slow Internet connection. Your offline system still need Internet connection to install Synaptic package manager if it not installed already. So that is not a viable solution to install packages on an offline system. Don’t be disappointed! There is an another way to install packages in an offline Ubuntu system. Meet Camicri Cube, a portable package manager to download applications on any internet connected computers (Ubuntu Linux or Windows), and install them back on your offline computer. Sounds great? Yes!

Another month passed, just like that. I spent last week holed up with some KDE people in the hills, watching the snow come down. While they did impressive things to the KDE codebase, I hacked on Calamares. Since my last post on the topic, I’ve been running a roughly every-other-week release schedule for the Calamares 3.1-stable branch. We’ve just reached 3.1.10. The reason for these stable releases is small bugfixes, minor polishing, and occasional non-interfering features.

Each release is announced on the Calamares site, and can be found on the Calamares GitHub page.

Calamares isn’t a KDE project, and aims to support whatever Linux distro wants to use it, and to configure the stuff that is needed for that distro. But when feature requests show up for KDE integration, there’s no special reason for me to reject them — as long as things can remain modular, the SKIP_MODULES mechanism in Calamares can avoid unwanted KDE Frameworks dependencies.

The feed reader, which has been around since 2003, regularly features in lists of the best open-source feed reader apps for Linux.

In fact, Liferea is often the recommended choice for anyone looking to read RSS feeds on the Linux desktop. It’s reliable, highly configurable, and “just works”. It also wide support for different feed formats (including RSS, Atom and OMPL).

As Liferea recently picked up its first major update in a year I decided it was time to check in on the app to see if, in an era of visually-rich online feed reader services like Feedly and NewsBlur, Liferea can still compete.

The idea of a color picker might be foreign (and maybe unuseful ) to some people but this post is for designers and developers who are on the Linux platform since they are the ones who usually need to differentiate colors by using Hex codes, CMYK, or RGB values.

As Deepin OS users probably already know, they need not search far and wide for such a utility because the Deepin Tech has got them covered.

Deepin Picker is an open-source fast screen color picking tool developed by Deepin Technology for Deepin OS. With it, you can hover and click to pick color codes in the form of RGB, RGBA, CMYK, HEX, and HSV which are automatically saved to your clipboard.

I’m a big fan of Prometheus and Grafana. As a former SRE at Google I’ve learned to appreciate good monitoring, and this combination has been a winner for me over the past year. I’m using them for monitoring my personal servers (both black-box and white-box monitoring), for the Euskal Encounter external and internal event infra, for work I do professionally for clients, and more. Prometheus makes it very easy to write custom exporters to monitor your own data, and there’s a good chance you’ll find an exporter that already works for you out of the box. For example, we use sql_exporter to make a pretty dashboard of attendee metrics for the Encounter events.

Fedora 27 is another in a long string of passionless, apathetic, badly stitched autumn releases that just make the Linux desktop look ever sadder and less relevant than ever before. Tons of hardware problems, crashes, bleak and useless UI, fonts and color problems, broken Samba. On the upside, media and smartphone support is good, performance is reasonable for an ancient box, and Nvidia drivers setup was elegant.

But remember, this is 2017. You need tons of extra, unofficial software just to make the desktop usable, there are so many inconsistencies it drives me mad, and if you just compare across the board, there's literally NOTHING in common with any which distro. For me, Fedora 24/25 was the highlight of this system, a brief glimmer of hope. If you feel the need, go ahead, but I'd say skip, wait, cry. Grade 2/10. On to the next tribulation.

Aries launched a $33 “SpiderBase” carrier with a large prototyping area for its recent “MX10” COM, which can run NIOS II softcore Linux on a MAX 10 FPGA.

In March, when we reported on the i.MX6 UL based M6UL computer-on-module from Aries Embedded, we also briefly noted that an MX10 computer-on-module was on the way. Since then, Aries has shipped the MX10, and has now launched SpiderBase (AKA Spiderboard Baseboard) for the module.

Collabora's Emil Velikov is pleased to announce today the general availability of the final Mesa 17.3 graphics stack release for GNU/Linux distributions.

Mesa or Mesa 3D Graphics Library is an open-source graphics stack, a collection of open-source graphics drivers to bring support for the latest OpenGL and Vulkan technologies to Intel, AMD Radeon, and Nvidia graphics cards on Linux-based operating systems.

Delays pushed back the Mesa 17.3 release from November, but this quarterly update to the Mesa 3D graphics stack is now available for users.

Mesa 17.3 is another significant update this year for the open-source graphics drivers. Mesa 17.3 offers nearly complete OpenGL 4.6 support for RadeonSI / Intel / Nouveau NVC0 drivers with the notable exception of the SPIR-V ingestion support yet not being complete. Mesa 17.3 also contains significant improvements to the Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers with new extension support, performance optimizations, and all important fixes.

Mesa 17.3.0 is the latest version of the open source graphics drivers and it has officially released today.

While this is a major new version, as always, new versions can cause a bit of breakage due to so much changing. The Mesa developers recommend waiting for the first point release 17.3.1 if you're after a stable and reliable experience.

Available for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms, the Qt Creator 4.5 release comes three months after the previous version to add a new UI tool that lets you manage Android SDK packages, as well as to offer better information about various issues with the installed Android SDK, including warnings about missing components or the minimum version of requirements.

"Since Android SDK tools version 25.3.0, there is no UI tool available to manage the Android SDK packages. Because of that, we have added such UI to Qt Creator," Eike Ziller wrote in the release announcement. "Unfortunately, the command line tool for managing SDKs that is provided with the SDK cannot update packages on Windows, and fails with JDK 9, so this applies to Qt Creator as well."

Coming six months after the long-term supported Qt 5.9 series, Qt 5.10 is a short-lived branch that introduces new stuff and a bunch of improvements. The biggest new feature of the Qt 5.10 release being the introduction of Qt 3D Studio, a graphical editor that lets you create 3D graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

"Qt 3D Studio consists of both a runtime component that is run in your application and a graphical design tool to design and create the UI. While the tool is a standalone application, the runtime can easily be integrated with the rest of Qt," said Lars Knoll. "Qt 3D Studio will work with both Qt 5.9 and 5.10."

First introduced in the ReactOS 0.4.5 release, the support for styles created for Microsoft's Windows XP operating system received further enhancements in ReactOS 0.4.7 to reduce visual glitches for several apps, as well as to better handle transparency and messaging.

ReactOS 0.4.7 also implements support for Shell extension and allows users to enable the Quick Launch shell extension manually if they want an early taste of this feature. Furthermore, the devs managed to bring the ReactOS painting process closer to the one of the Microsoft Windows OS.

The Debian Installer Buster Alpha 2 release comes with a few important changes, such as the addition of the unattended-upgrades package by default through the pkgsel component to ensure the automatic installation of security upgrades, as well as the addition of the installation images for the mips64el architecture.

Another important change in this second alpha release of the Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" Installer is that the Linux 4.13 kernel series is now supported for new installations, though you should know it reached end of life last month, so we believe the third alpha of Debian Installer will support Linux kernel 4.14 LTS.

More in Tux Machines

Debian-Based Q4OS Linux Distro to Get a New Look with Debonaire Desktop Theme

Q4OS is a small GNU/Linux distribution based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux operating system and built around the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). It's explicitly designed to make the Microsoft Windows to Linux transition accessible and more straightforward as possible for anyone.
Dubbed Debonaire, the new desktop theme uses dark-ish elements for the window titlebar and panel. Somehow it resembles the look and feels of the acclaimed Arc GTK+ theme, and it makes the Q4OS operating system more modern than the standard look offered by the Trinity Desktop Environment.

today's leftovers

Emmabuntüs recently released a video where they explain the goals and reasons of the project, current achievements and show people who really use this operating system. You can also see the members of the project live.

The U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued the second draft of the proposed update to the Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity—also known as the Cybersecurity Framework. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) encourages all relevant stakeholders to submit draft comments to NIST by the deadline on Friday, January 19, 2018.

VLC 3.0 is something we've been looking forward to for years and it's looking like that big multimedia player update could be released very soon.
Thanks to Phoronix reader Fran for pointing out that VLC 3.0 release candidates have begun to not much attention. VLC 3.0 RC1 was tagged at the end of November and then on Tuesday marked VLC 3.0 RC2 being tagged, but without any official release announcements.

A new major release is available of Cryptsetup, the user-space utility for dealing with the DMCrypt kernel module for setting up encrypted disk volumes.
Cryptsetup 2.0.0 is notable in that it introduces support for the new on-disk LUKS2 format but still retaining support for LUKS(1). The LUKS2 format is security hardened to a greater extent, more extensible than LUKS, supports in-place upgrading from LUKS, and other changes.

There is no doubt Facebook is one of the most popular and dynamic social network platform in the modern Internet era. It has revolutionized technology, social networking, and the future of how we live and interact. With Facebook, We can connect, communicate with one another, instantly share our memories, photos, files and even money to anyone, anywhere in the world. Even though Facebook has its own official messenger, some tech enthusiasts and developers are developing alternative and feature-rich apps to communicate with your buddies. The one we are going to discuss today is Caprine. It is a free, elegant, open source, and unofficial Facebook messenger desktop app built with Electron framework.

It turns out that if firing up KDE's KWin Wayland compositor without XWayland support, it can start up so fast that it causes problems.
Without XWayland for providing legacy X11 support to KDE Wayland clients, the KWin compositor fires up so fast that it can cause a crash in their Wayland integration as KWin's internal connection isn't even established... Yep, Wayland compositors are much leaner and cleaner than the aging X Server code-base that dates back 30+ years, granted most of the XWayland code is much newer than that.

NetworkManager now has support for Intel's lean "IWD" WiFi daemon.
IWD is a lightweight daemon for managing WiFi devices via a D-Bus interface and has been in development since 2013 (but was only made public in 2016) and just depends upon GCC / Glibc / ELL (Embedded Linux Library).

Linux Foundation: Servers, Kubernetes and OpenContrail

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, home of the Kubernetes open-source community, grew wildly this year. It welcomed membership from industry giants like Amazon Web Services Inc. and broke attendance records at last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in Austin, Texas. This is all happy news for Kubernetes — the favored platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). The technology needs all the untangling, simplifying fingers it can get.
This is also why most in the community are happy to tamp down their competitive instincts to chip away at common difficulties. “You kind of have to,” said Michelle Noorali (pictured), senior software engineer at Microsoft and co-chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America & Europe 2017. “These problems are really hard.”

Network slicing is poised to play a pivotal role in the enablement of 5G. The technology allows operators to run multiple virtual networks on top of a single, physical infrastructure. With 5G commercialization set for 2020, many are wondering to what extend network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) can help move network slicing forward.

Juniper Networks has announced its intent to move the codebase for OpenContrail, an open-source network virtualisation platform for the cloud, to the Linux Foundation. OpenContrail provides both software-defined networking (SDN) and security features and has been deployed by various organisations, including cloud providers, telecom operators and enterprises to simplify operational complexities and automate workload management across diverse cloud environments.

Juniper Networks plans to move the codebase for its OpenContrail open-source network virtualization platform for the cloud to the Linux Foundation, broadening its efforts to drive more software innovations into the broader IT and service provider community.
The vendor is hardly a novice in developing open source platforms. In 2013, Juniper released its Contrail products as open sourced and built a user and developer community around the project. To drive its next growth phase, Juniper expanded the project’s governance, creating an even more open, community-led effort.

The annual Open Source Jobs Report from Dice and The Linux Foundation reveals a lot about prospects for open source professionals and hiring activity in the year ahead. In this year’s report, 86 percent of tech professionals said that knowing open source has advanced their careers. Yet what happens with all that experience when it comes time for advancing within their own organization or applying for a new roles elsewhere?